One of the biggest mistakes almost everybody makes in their workout happens during their warm up. Most people walk into the gym and immediately start doing static stretching, aka stretching without movement. The problem with that is that our muscles are elastic, they need a certain amount of blood flow to happen before the muscle is WARM enough to perform a static stretch. When you do static stretching without warming up first, you actually TEAR your muscles slightly instead of stretch them. This obviously hinders the workout you’re warming up for, and also slows your results; due to the fact that you are starting each workout with tons of tiny micro-tears in muscle fibers you were just stretching.

So never stretch unless you are already warm. The best way to warm up is to move; do some crawling, hanging, mobility, some light cardio, something that will get your heart rate up and increase your blood flow for at least 5-10 minutes. Static stretching is best left for post workout cool downs.

Check out these feet!!! You’re either looking at that being totally grossed out, or you’re like me and are fascinated by how this mans feet have developed. These are the feet of an Ashaninka Indian who lives in a rainforest in the upper Amazon Basin of Peru. His feet look like this because he doesn’t wear shoes! That’s right. He walks all over the treacherous rainforest in bare feet all the time, and this is the result; an incredibly strong foundation that provides soooooo much support to his body it’s hard for most of us to fathom. This is what most people’s feet should look like; hard, tough, BIG, ugly, muscular, and super calisced. But our feet are soft, weak, dainty, and not as ugly as this. Which is one of the many reasons why so many people have had so many injuries and continually have physical pains and aches; their foundation is weak so the rest of the structure (their body) has to take on more stress than it’s designed too. Start being barefoot as often as possible, use your toes, walk on the grass and feel the earth with your feet, strengthen your foundation. Photo credit @franslanting